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Rejecting Dualism. Moreover, theologians concede that modern skepticism about eternity is fully justified. Says the University of San Francisco's Jesuit Philosopher Francis J. Marien: "An afterlife that is viewed as an opiate, a kind of workmen's compensation for an ugly and painful existence, is bound to be unattractive." Stanford University's Protestant Dean of the Chapel B. Davie Napier believes that God and man are cheapened by the idea that good behavior can buy "a good berth in the afterlife." As for hell, Napier shares the growing consensus that perdition cannot be permanent. To condemn even an unrepentant Hitler to eternal suffering, he says, "makes a demon out of God."
The new Christian thinking begins by rejecting the Greek dualism of body and soul. The old idea of a soul that departs from the body at death "makes no sense at all," says Roman Catholic Theologian Peter Riga of California's St. Mary's College. "There is just man, man in God's image and likeness. Man in his totality was created and will be saved." Such theologians emphasize God's presence in the world. "God is the source of creativity and change and human selfhood," says Harvard's Harvey Cox. In sum, the process of salvation and damnation takes place on earth—not somewhere "out there."
In the new eschatology, hell is something more believable than a pit of unending fire. To most theologians, the inferno is best expressed as alienation from God's universal design, and therefore from one's fellow men. "Hell is estrangement, isolation, despair," says Acting Dean Lloyd Kalland of Gordon Divinity School in Wenham, Mass.
"Man, a social being, is removed from all that gives meaning and satisfaction." U.S. Lutheran Theologian Joseph Sittler contends that there is a measure of essential Christian truth in Sartre's depiction of hell as other people. In his Principles of Christian Theology, Dr. John Macquarrie of Union Theological Seminary describes hell as "not some external or arbitrary punishment that gets assigned for sin, but simply the working out of sin itself, as it destroys the distinctively personal being of the sinner."
New Instructions. Conversely, heaven is now defined as the triumph of self-giving—not as some celestial leisure village. "Heaven is cordial, honest, loving relationships," says Gordon's Kalland. According to Macquarrie, "Heaven is simply the goal of human existence." Such a view parallels that of Swiss Theologian Karl Barth, who wrote that "resurrection means not the continuation of life, but life's completion. The Christian hope does not lead us away from this life."